Harrison’s product managment experience

Apart from the overview, the remainder of this page will be responses to interview questions I’ve answered.

Overview

As a Technical product manager I led new product development of a top 10 priority product suite (SDK) from inception to launch. I’ve paid for 1on1 Product management coaching with my own money, have Pragmatic Marketing’s Focus and Foundations certifications, and write about product management (https://harrisonobiorah.com/category/product-management/). I have a B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, but I began developing my technical skills in shigh school when I would jailbreak my iPhone and modify programs to play video games I enjoyed.

Because I’m the oldest of 3 siblings, I’d like to say I’m continuously coaching and have been coaching for several years. I’ve taken courses to improve my ability to help myself and others with managing their emotions. I’ve also studied the drivers of high performance, purpose, and leadership via books and courses on my own dime and write about those topics on my website to help others and companies improve performance.

Explain the software you have helped build as a product manager and how many customers it serves. 

As a Technical product manager, I led the creation of a developer toolkit (like Android/iOS SDK) for software engineers and system administrators. Developers use this SDK to pull monitoring data for important infrastructure components into the Sciencelogic platform. One of the immediate goals of the SDK is to reduce the skill level requirements and development time costs for building monitoring integrations. The target personas are Sciencelogic’s engineering teams and external customers that need integrations Sciencelogic can’t build. To accomplish these goals I lead workstreams to:

• Transform the development process to be low-code
• Provide self-debug capabilities through previously inaccessible logging
• Produce and share self-serve development and training materials

The SDK’s alpha customers were Sciencelogic’s engineering (~60 engineers), sales engineering(~10), and professional services (~5) departments. Our beta customers were Dell, CDW, and Telstra, with average development team sizes of 7 engineers.

One of the long-term goals of this product is to enable a profit-sharing ecosystem (like an app store) of technology partners that build integrations to expand the portfolio of available integrations for Sciencelogic customers.

Explain your most recent major product release, the new functionality that was delivered, and your role in the launch 

That would be the initial launch of the SDK for engineering. I was the product manager responsible for product strategy, the backlog, UI/UX proposals, reviews and approvals, and day-to-day interaction (standup, sprint review, planning, etc) with my dev team. I produced product copy that marketing reviewed, created the documentation outline that the dev and documentation team used to build our product documentation, and set up training and internal support channels for sales engineering and professional services. To improve the odds of customers successfully achieving their goals with the toolkit, I worked with my engineering and documentation team to create a getting started guide and curriculum of prerequisite skills and knowledge. As a product manager, I also created processes, documentation, and surveys for soliciting product feedback, submitting bugs, and providing engineering-level support for escalations.

Features:

• A low-code development framework for building Sciencelogic integrations packaged with API documentation (The previous non-low-code paradigm had no standardized documentation), best practices, examples, and onboarding documentation. This documentation enables developers to solve uncommon and complex use cases that require custom code with the framework.
• Self-debug capabilities are provided with a well-known log file, a single log management, and a documented troubleshooting process.
• Improved Out-of-the-box scale

Release results:

• Engineering released 4 production integrations using the toolkit. These integrations are responsible for over 6-figures in yearly revenue.
• The CPO issued a company mandate that all future product development in engineering, professional services, and sales engineering would use the toolkit except for special situations.
• Due to this mandate, the toolkit will be the backbone of products and services worth $1M+ in yearly revenue.
  • The external customer beta list contained Fortune 500 companies Dell, CDW, and Telstra.

Explain your experience working directly with customers and your experience in consultative and customer-facing roles

I was the customer point of contact for internal and external customers as a product manager for 3 years. I worked with US, India, South America, and Europe customers.

As a software engineer working in the ATM department I interfaced with ATM associates using our software to understand product painpoints and also led discovery interviews with our ATM deployment team. I used insights from those interviews to pitch a new KPI impacting microservice and owned it as a PO and tech lead.

Things that come naturally to me are interviewing, listening, and coaching. I also like strategy.

An IBM customer said this about my customer interaction and product skills:

“It’s not common for me to work with a senior product manager from another company to accomplish a challenging goal. Besides the inherent difficulties in creating a new module for the ScienceLogic monitoring platform intended for one of our main middleware products, there’s the challenge of creating synergy between a mixed team from 2 companies apart. I should say I had an enjoyable experience working directly with you to design and refine requirements for the ScienceLogic PowerPack for IBM MQ. During these few months that we worked together every week, I could see how knowledgeable you are and driven by business objectives. You demonstrated openness, trustworthiness, understanding, and the ability to manage this joint project with excellence.

The results are not surprising: a full ScienceLogic module developed with IBM best practices for MQ with success. Thanks for much for your hard-working and for being such a great colleague.”

–Client transformation SRE from Kyndryl (formely IBM)